The Road to Little Dribbling (23 page)

I

F
OR SOME TIME,
I
have believed that everyone should be allowed to have, say, ten things that they dislike without having to justify or explain to anyone why they don’t like them. Reflex loathings, I call them.

Mine are:

Power walkers.

Those vibrating things restaurants give you to let you know when a table is ready.

Television programs in which people bid on the contents of locked garages.

All pigeons everywhere, at all times.

Lawyers, too.

Douglas Brinkley, a minor academic and sometime book reviewer whose powers of observation and generosity of spirit would fit comfortably into a proton and still leave room for an echo.

Color names like taupe and teal that don’t mean anything.

Saying that you are going to “reach out” to someone when what you mean is that you are going to call or get in touch with them.

People who give their telephone number so rapidly at the end of long phone messages that you have to listen over and over and eventually go and get someone else to come and listen with you, and even then you still can’t get it.

Nebraska.

Mispronouncing “buoy.” The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a “boo-ee.” It’s a “boy.” Think about it. Would you call something that floats “boo-ee-ant”? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Brett Favre’s last name as if the “r” comes before the “v.” It doesn’t, so stop it.

Hotel showers that don’t give any indication of which way is hot and which cold.

All the sneaky taxes, like “visitor tax” and “hospitality tax” and “fuck you because you’re from out of town tax,” that are added to hotel bills.

Baseball commentators who get bored with the game by about the third inning and start talking about their golf game or where they ate last night.

Brett Favre.

I know that is more than ten, but this is my concept, so I get some bonus ones. Now you might think that driving in the West Country of England in the summertime would be on my list, but it doesn’t qualify because it’s an obvious and rational loathing. It’s the same reason you can’t put men who wear cravats or people who take signs to sporting events so that they can be on TV. It has to be something that some people don’t necessarily agree with, and no one can dispute that driving in the West Country in the summertime is a nightmare.

It took me over an hour to cross the Tamar Bridge, which was only one lane wide going west. What on earth were they thinking when they built it? That was in 1961, at the very time they were trying to put motorways everywhere, but in the one spot where a bit of expansiveness would have made obvious sense, they decided to economize. Go figure.

Beyond Plymouth, traffic would zip along for a couple of miles, then back up for hundreds of yards at a roundabout, creep forward in increments of two feet for about ten minutes, then speed up again, only to be repeated at the next roundabout, and there were lots of roundabouts.

And so I made my fitful way across Cornwall, past turnings for Looe, Polperro, Fowey, and a succession of other coastal villages. I was tempted to nip down and have a look at one or two of them, but all the roads to the sea were dead ends and at each I could see long lines of RVs and cars loaded with bicycles and kayaks heading toward the water, and knew that it would take an hour or more to reach the village and then there would almost certainly be no place to park. Nonetheless, just beyond St. Austell, bored and restive, I impulsively took a turning for Mevagissey.

Rarely have I more immediately regretted something that I knew I would immediately regret. The road to Mevagissey was twisting and slow. It took forever to reach the outskirts, where there was a single large parking lot. Cars were queuing to get in. I asked the attendant if I could just turn around. He said of course, and then recognized me, which pleased me. (It doesn’t happen very often. Ask any author.) His name was Matthew Facey, and he wasn’t the parking lot attendant but the owner. The lot has been in his family for years and it keeps him busy in the summer, but his real passion is photography. I looked at his website later and he is very good. Anyway, we had a nice chat and he urged me to come back out of season, which I promised to do.

On the way back to the A390, the main road to Penzance, my destination for the night, I passed a sign for “the Lost Gardens of Heligan” and made an abrupt, impetuous turn down a side lane, bringing a moment’s unscheduled excitement to two cyclists and a motor home. I had never heard of this place, but I was curious to know how you lose gardens. The Lost Gardens of Heligan turn out to be the work of Tim Smit, a Dutchman who has lived in England for years and who is also responsible for the popular Eden Project, a giant nature center and botanical expo a dozen miles to the north on the other side of St. Austell.

Heligan was once a great estate, set high on a rolling hill above the sea, with a staff that included twenty-two gardeners. But Heligan fell on hard times and the gardens lapsed into weedy ruin. When Smit and his business partner, John Nelson, came along in 1990, the gardens had been untended for seventy years. Smit and Nelson decided to restore them. It was a monumental task. After seventy years, not much was left even in outline. Two and a half miles of woodland paths had vanished. Greenhouses had fallen in on themselves. Walled gardens were chest-deep in brambles. More than 750 fallen trees had to be cleared away before real renovations could begin. It seemed an impossible task, but Smit, who had trained as an archaeologist at Durham University, brought an archaeologist’s rigor to the task. The upshot is that after years of hard labor, the gardens were restored and today are splendid and thronged, as they deserve to be.

They cover a huge expanse, much of it woodland, and I must say I was grateful to stretch my legs after so many hours in the car. The woodland walks seem to go on for miles. At first I thought that is all Heligan was, just woods and ferns, but then I came across a walled cutting garden, full of bright, nodding blooms and dancing butterflies. In the distance the sea was just visible, a bright pale blue beneath a matching sky. It was all very fine. In the café I had a refreshing cup of tea and a lovely dry piece of cake—cautiously flavorful in the British style, satisfying but not so delicious that you would want a second piece for a month or so—and returned to the road feeling gloriously restored, like Heligan itself.

—

Once every springtime for several years I took a train from London to Penzance, at the very bottom of Cornwall, and spent the night there before continuing on the next day to the Scilly Isles to attend the Tresco Marathon. The marathon was held on behalf of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. I didn’t run the marathon myself, needless to say, but attended as a kind of cheerleader and just walked around and shouted helpful, distracting remarks to the runners as they struggled past. The Tresco Marathon was one of the most wonderful things ever. It was held at the same time as the London Marathon, and it existed because the chef at the island hotel, a guy named Pete Hingston, realized he could never run in London on behalf of his little girl, Jade, a cystic fibrosis sufferer, because it was too busy a time to leave Tresco. So with his wife, Fiona, he started a marathon on Tresco and it rapidly blossomed.

Because Tresco is small and can only hold so many visitors, entries were limited to a hundred runners, which made it both exclusive and intimate. There are people in the world who collect marathons, and Tresco was one of the hardest to bag. The course was also very tough. Because of the island’s size, runners had to do eight laps around it, which included eight ascents of a long hill. Marathons don’t usually require you to run up a hill eight times. Many of the runners were there because of a personal connection to cystic fibrosis, and ran on behalf of siblings or partners or children. On at least one occasion, the runner had cystic fibrosis herself; however long you live, you will never see anything more heroic or moving than a person with cystic fibrosis completing a marathon. It was just the best thing ever. It really was. And at the end of the day, having run a marathon, Pete went off to the hotel and spent an evening cooking.

The only downside in getting to Tresco is getting to Tresco. Formerly there were two ways. One was to take the ferry. This is the way I came on my first visit, and I have to say it was a curious experience. All the passengers—and there weren’t very many—went below and lay down on whatever horizontal surfaces they could find. Many covered their faces with their coats, as if hiding. Just after we left port, the snack bar closed. All this seemed a little strange, and then we hit the open sea and began to roll and pitch in a weirdly restrained but emphatic way. I am not the most experienced of sailors, but I have been on a few boats in my time—including once through the Beagle Channel in South America, which isn’t so much a water passage as a trampoline for boats—and I can say that I had never encountered anything quite like this. It wasn’t rough, but just slowly, cumulatively, peculiarly unsettling. The problem, as it was explained to me later, is that the ferry must have a flat bottom to get in among the shallows around St. Mary’s, the main port of the Scillies, but this means that it sits on the water like a cork, which guarantees a lot of motion even on the smoothest days. In rough weather, I was told, it bounces so much you can have the novel experience of being sick on the ceiling.

One person on Tresco (whose identity I am sworn not to disclose) told me that once he made the sea crossing from Penzance in winter, and when the ferry reached Land’s End, where the currents of the English Channel, Irish Sea, and North Atlantic come together in a foamy vortex, the ship could make no headway. For something like two hours it just rode the bouncy waves, unable to go anywhere, until finally the winds relented or tides changed or something, and the ship was suddenly able to chug forward and complete the twenty-five-mile crossing. But when it reached St. Mary’s, the waves in the harbor were too big for it to dock.

“The captain announced that he was going to give it one more try and if that failed we’d have to turn around and go back to Penzance, into even rougher seas,” my informant told me. “I swear to you, no exaggeration, I was holding on to a lifesaver and I was seriously thinking of jumping overboard and taking my chances of swimming to the dock. That’s how bad it can be. Luckily, however, the waters calmed for a minute and we were able to tie up at the quayside. You have never seen twenty people get off a ship faster.”

The only other way to get there was on a giant helicopter. I wasn’t too crazy about the helicopter either because its record was not entirely flawless. In 1983, when it was operated by British Airways, the Scilly helicopter crashed in poor weather. Twenty people died. I took the helicopter several times and it was always fine, but it did rather feel like something that should have been in the Imperial War Museum in the Korean War section. The helicopter service was ended in 2012, on economic grounds, and what used to be the Scilly airfield in Penzance is now a giant Sainsbury’s supermarket. Today if you want to get to Scilly, you brave the ferry or fly in a small airplane from one of three mainland airports.

In 2010, after ten years of heroic existence, the Tresco Marathon was likewise canceled on economic grounds after a sponsor pulled out. So the Tresco Marathon is just history. There is no question about it. We live in dispiriting times.

—

I was pleased to be back in Penzance. My usual hotel was closed for refurbishment, so my wife had booked me into a boutique hotel at the other end of town. I dropped my bags and hit the streets, keen to get in a walk before dinner and to see how Penzance had changed since I was last there.

Penzance ought to be fabulous. It has a superlative setting overlooking St. Michael’s Mount, a romantic castle on a rock nearly identical to but much less well known than its namesake across the English Channel in Brittany. It has a long and agreeable promenade and a harbor that could be lovely with a little paint and imagination, and perhaps one or two sticks of dynamite. Its streets are narrow and beguiling. The terraced houses have a neighborly feel and often enjoy bewitching views. It must be splendid to look out your bedroom window first thing in the morning and know what kind of day it’s going to be from the color of the sea.

There isn’t anything about Penzance that isn’t promising. Yet it is a sad and fading place. I walked through the town and was struck by the number of businesses that had gone since my last visit. The Star Inn was boarded up. A restaurant called the Buttery was gone. Several shops were dark and empty. The London Inn was still going but didn’t look to be thriving. A sign by the door said: “This is a public house, not a public toilet.” I was glad to see that the management had taken a stand on the issue, but I can’t say it struck me exactly as an inducement to enter. The Ganges Indian restaurant, where I had often dined, was also gone, though I wasn’t altogether surprised. It was so bad that it wasn’t even within hailing distance of being dreadful. I was generally the only customer. The service was always excellent.

Across the street from the Ganges was a good pub called the Turk’s Head. I looked through the window now and it was heaving with a Saturday night crowd, so I walked down the street to another good pub, the Admiral Benbow, and it was even fuller. I went back to the Turk’s Head and waded into the throngs at the bar. It took an age to get a pint, but to my joy when I turned from the bar I spied a tiny table being vacated and I grabbed it. When I asked a passing waitress about food, she was happy to take an order, but was candid in telling me that service was going to be very slow. The upshot was that for the rest of the evening about every forty minutes the waitress would bring something to my table, and assure me that I hadn’t been forgotten. Generally what she brought was something that would help me with my food when eventually it came—salt and pepper shakers, silverware wrapped in a paper napkin—but once she brought a slice of bread and butter, which I devoured more or less in a single gulp, like a frog with a fly. At about 8:40, I got a bowl of soup, steaming and delicious, and after a further long interval I received my main course of fish and chips. In between, I had a little bowl of tartar sauce, a pat of butter, and many pints of beer. I also learned that if you drink a sufficient amount, dinner ceases to matter very much.